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The lazycoder puts up his take on the whole custom classes versus datasets ( et al ) debate. He draws the line on making strongly typed collections, for no other reason than performance - rather, performance pertaining to the amount of memory utilization.

The true fact of the matter is that the memory overhead you pay for using strongly typed collections is quite small. 900 Customer objects in a CustomerCollection is the same order ( as in big-O notation ) as 900 datarows in a datatable. If anything, your ability to control the memory utilization is greater when using the CustomerCollection since you control the footprint of each Customer. You have much less control over the memory footprint of the datarow.

So, if memory utilization is better with strongly typed collections ( or even the same assuming a common case ), memory utilization does not appear to be a valid concern for choosing datasets & co over strongly typed collections.

Development time is a valid concern, and is brought up quite often. From my experience, it does take less time to use datasets to get to the 80% functionality mark. However, that last 20% becomes that much harder because the ability to control datasets' behaviour is quite diminished. Thus, over the entire development lifecycle, I find that strongly typed everything works in my best interests.

One final note - I'm not against auto-generated code. Quite the opposite, really. I try to automate any parts of the development process that I can. However, I am against relying on code generated by something not under my control, and am dead set against not understanding how that code works. Code breaks, automated code breaks automatically.